The first snow of
the season had come overnight. It was just a light dusting, and this
came already late in the winter.

Isa liked the snow;
it was the wind of winter she could not stand, and fortunately, there
had not been much of that this year. Snow, when it came without wind,
was peaceful. If she watched the sun come up over the whitened plains
in the distance, she would see the ground gleam like a diamond. It
was one of her favorite things about winter, and Isa would not miss
it if at all possible. This morning was no exception.

Isa had a very warm
woolen coat and a few pairs of warm pants and gloves for days in
freezing temperatures, so she put these on very early and went
outside. She walked east along the Windmill Road until she reached
the top of a small hill. From here, she could look out on the
countryside for a few kilometers into the distance. The sun would
rise in about half an hour; a band of indigo had just begun to creep
up on the eastern horizon.

She yawned and
brushed the snow off a rock to the side of the road. Then she sat on
this rock—it was about the right size for her to do so—and
waited. There was something surreal in the whole experience, she
thought. The air lay stagnant, the land silent to the point where her
breath was the only thing she could hear. Snow had stopped falling
hours ago, and the clouds had departed, leaving the sky a perfectly
dark blue. Isa imagined that she was inside a marble, looking
out—that sky could be made of glass, she thought. The stars,
which were out in abundance this morning, could be reflections of
light off a glossy but uneven sheen. And she may not have been able
to tell, but when she looked up at that clear, cold sky, she may have
been looking out on an entire world. She mused, There were many
people from places east, west, north and south... so why not up, too?
How would one ever know?

Maybe someday, if
she were lucky, someone from that world beyond would come down on his
or her way to somewhere else... and stop by The Windmill Road during
the journey and have a drink or two at the tavern...

What types of
stories would a person like that tell?

Time went on, and
to Isa, the chill in the air only added to the calm of the
atmosphere. It made her hold her coat in closer to her body, but it
would not, she determined, be enough to make her catch a cold. Once
the sun had risen, she would get a hot cup of tea back at the tavern.

As she continued to
wait, she thought (as she often had over the course of the last few
days) about Asmir. He had taken her advice and spoke with Roth about
using a horse liniment to help his face heal. He already looked much
better for it, too. The only part of him Isa was convinced would
never heal fully was his voice—though for all she knew, maybe
that too would only be a matter of time.

Asmir and the
townspeople spent most of the time these days during his visit by
trading stories. Asmir learned about the trade routes that went
through The Windmill Road, the seasonal patterns of visitors, and
some of the ways of simple country life. Meanwhile, he described his
home town in detail, then described his family and friends... by the
time he had finished, practically his whole life story, or the main
events in it, at least, were all out in the open. Most interesting to
the villages were the stories of his trips to Incria, the great city
of the Aren Country Northeast. It was hard for Isa to imagine that
city, even when he painted such a vivid picture of it, she thought;
for one thing, she could scarcely envision a wall so large it could
surround an area over a hundred times larger than her town. And
within that wall, which stretched upward above every building in the
city except the enormous clock at its center, more than a thousand
people lived. Now that Incria stood victorious and its highest
general (a man by the name of Kelshin) had declared himself king,
there were plans in the making for a palace to be built. This would
necessitate whole sections of the wall to be torn down and rebuilt
later, in a larger perimeter, around the new edifice.

The part that
confused Isa the most was how Asmir could talk about such things as
if they were commonplace, trivial, and even to be taken for granted.
To her it sounded like he said nonchalantly, “Yeah, it’s
a big wall... but all you have to do is tear down part of it and
build it up again. It’s not big deal.”

Well, maybe it was
not a big deal to people who lived in that city. Then again, maybe
some of the things Isa took for granted, such as the vast countryside
now before her, would seem unbelievable to a city resident. All this
land, she mused, would make for a very large yard in the city,
indeed.

Simple country
life...

Isa repeated the
concept to herself and knew it was true. For people living on farms,
there were very real hardships to overcome every year, but for a
tavern waitress? Her life never met with any trials or tribulations
that amounted to more than being out of ingredients for the meal of
the day. Aside from the one day when she saw war firsthand, she was
so far away from what anyone might consider to be the real problems
of the world. And this was, for the most part, fine with her. So what
if the rest of the world, more or less, went on without her and did
not care? She knew she was not in any position to change the world or
save it from itself. The ones who could do that (or, more correctly,
the humans among them) were born far east of The Windmill Road. They
lived in privilege and surrounded themselves with power. Now with
Desdon defeated once and for all, only one man apparently wielded
that type of power in all the East. Now that he had it, Isa wondered,
how would he use it? She might never know the answer to that...
though she had a hunch that she would find out sooner or later thanks
to travelers’ stories...

A breeze blew
across Isa’s face and brought her out of her thoughts and back
to reality for the moment. The sun was about to come up. Lighter and
lighter blues lined the sky in front of her, and the first sign of
yellow appeared then over the next hill. Isa knew enough about the
sun not to look at it directly, but when it came, its brilliance
astounded her nonetheless. One second, the land was dark, and the
next, it glowed, each snowflake on the ground reflecting the cold but
piercing light of the morning. The temperature did not change, but
Isa felt somewhat warmed anyway—until the wind picked up in an
instant and reminded her of her earlier thought: getting a hot cup of
tea at the tavern. She would get to that in a minute, she now
decided; most of the hill in front of her still lay in shadow, and
she wanted to see things get just a little lighter...

About half an hour later, she found herself shivering. At that point,
she stood up and turned to go back into the village. When she was
halfway there, she looked back and saw the whitened road go over the
hill, where a silhouette of a rock jutted from the ground to the side
of the path. That rock, where she sat to watch the winter sunrise,
was the very farthest she had ever wandered from her home.